A Song of Ice and Suns
by Wired Dragoon
Summary: A Song of Ice and Fire adapted into a scifi setting. Probably a one shot, though I might do more, depending on how the effort's received.


_After a few threads with the topic of ASOIAF in a scifi setting popped up on my favorite message board I decided to give it a try. It's a very straight forward adaption, very close to the original text. I still hope you enjoy it._

_- The usual disclaimers apply -_

**A Song of Ice and Suns**

PROLOGUE

"We should start back," Gared urged as a rock the size of a country manor drew past their fragile craft, the far too distant pale sunlight turning the slowly rotating pock-marked boulder into a spectacle of light and shadow. "The Wildlings are gone. Or dead. Either way suits me."

"Do the dead frighten you?" Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile.

Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, close to a hundred now, and he had seen the lordlings come and go. He wrinkled his nose at the smell inside the small ship. An old courier, nimble and with good endurance, and easy to maintain. Still, three grown men sharing a room no larger than a sleeping cell back at Castle Black for more than four weeks now was something the vessel's builders had never intended for. Gared thought he had gotten used to the rank and somewhat putrid stink of old sweat, other body odors and stale air. But right now he felt it bearing down on him like something he would need a good blade to cut through. Irritatedly he rubbed the back of his nose.

"Dead is dead," he said. "We have no business with the dead. And if they're gone, well..." He didn't need to finish the sentence. After a month beyond the wall the three of them were starting to run low on supplies. They couldn't bring Wildlings to justice if there were no Wildlings about, now could they?

But his commander would have none of that. "What proof have we?" Royce asked softly, nodding in the vague direction where he suspected their prey.

"Will took a look inside," Gared said. "If he saw nothing, that's proof enough for me."

Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. "Not exactly," he put in defensively. "I got as close as I dared. What few portholes I made out remained dark, and there was nothing on my scans that would've shown any activity. A place of that size, there ought to have been _something_ with people living there. Truly, I can't say if they're dead or simply have abandoned the place. But then, my mother once said that the dead make no sound."

"My wet nurse said the same thing, Will," Royce replied sardonically. "Never believe anything you hear at a woman's tit. Gone or dead, there are things to be learned even here." Cornered closely by metal and ceramics his voice echoed tinny and too loud inside the ship's sole cabin.

"We have a long flight back before us," Gared pointed out. "Eight days, maybe nine, depending on how hard we go on the fuel tanks. And we'll be in the Trident's shadow by then."

Ser Waymar Royce glanced at the vast darkness outside with disinterest. Even at their distance the orb of the Trident was visible, if barely so. Bands of storms embraced the gas giant, blue and ocher and white, each larger than a dozen planets and so powerful that even dipping into their highest layers would have torn their ship apart as if it were made from parchment. And even this far out the planet's shadow allowed for fiends of all kinds to roam about this side of the wall undetected. "You've traveled through the sunless void before, haven't you? Are you unmanned by the dark, Gared?"

Will could see the tightness around Gared's mouth, the barely suppressed anger in his deep-set eyes in a face scarred by decades of hardships. Gared had spent forty years in the Night's Watch, man and boy, and he was not accustomed to being made light of. Yet it was more than that. Under the wounded pride, Will could sense something else in the older man. You could taste it; a nervous tension that came perilous close to fear.

Will shared his unease. He had been four years on the Wall. The first time he had been sent beyond, all the old stories had come rushing back, and his bowels had turned to water. He had laughed about it afterward. He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now, and the endless dark and icy void that the core worlders called the Silent Expanse had no more terrors for him.

Until tonight. Something was different tonight. There was an edge to their situation that made his hackles rise. Close to four weeks they had been flying, outwards, then zigzagging through the nigh infinite expanses of rocks and ice, then outwards again, hard on the track of a band of Wildling raiders in their craft. Each day had been worse than the day that had come before it. Today was the worst of all.

The fields of ice and stone he saw outside the small piece of glass that was not really glass were more dense than what he had ever seen before, with pieces of black iron and dust and mountains of ice frozen at the eve of creation drifting through an ocean of white shards. Wherever a stray asteroid broke the serene surface it streamed back in again immediately, as if it were alive. All day, Will had felt as though something were watching him, something cold and implacable that loved him not. Gared had felt it too.

The Gods alone knew what truly lurked out there. They had not dared to use their active sensors for fear of scaring off their prey – or lure in more than they thought they could handle. Now the interference from all that rubble and ice had made their passives as good as useless, too. For all intents and purposes they were blind but for their own eyes; blind and trapped within a steel coffin clinging to the back of a gray, vaguely egg-shaped sphere of dust, pebbles and heavy metals.

Will wanted nothing so much as to release the anchors buried deep into the rock beneath them and redline their main engine hellbent for the safety of the Wall. But that was not a feeling to share with your commander.

Especially not a commander like this one.

Ser Waymar Royce was the youngest son of an ancient house with too many heirs and too few options. He was a handsome youth of eighteen, gray-eyed and graceful and slender as a knife. Sitting in the pilot's seat, slightly elevated above the men who – in theory – were his brothers, he mustered them with barely hidden disdain. His skinsuit was custom-made and of the finest quality money could buy on Reach. Black by design rather then wear, age and exposure to solar radiation it consisted of a tensile but durable dark gray alloy akin to the chainmail vests worn by heroes in the Age of Legend. Plates of armor as dark as deep space itself, forged from the best steel and carbon alloys the maesters could make and the Guild of Armorers could shape into form covered his torso and limbs down to the individual bones of his gloves. The armor was the young lordling's pride, and a second look revealed the reason: it's surface wasn't smooth metal, but had been meticulously crafted into hundreds of small, hexagonal pyramids meant to deflect and disperse blaster fire.

Ser Waymar had been a Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch for less than half a year, but no one could say he had not prepared for his vocation. At least insofar as his wardrobe was concerned. All his new gear, spick-and-span as if it had just been taken off a warehouse's shelf, gave him the look of a toy soldier.

"Bet he still keeps playing with these," Gared had told the barracks over wine – _real_ wine, if only the sour swill from Winterfell.

"Sure he still clutches a doll when he goes to bed," another had put in.

"True, but it's a _noble_ doll, ya see."

They had all shared the laugh.

It is hard to take orders from a man you laughed at in your cups, Will reflected as he sat shivering in his own battered and worn skinsuit. Gared must have felt the same.

"Mormont said as we should track them, and we did," Gared said. "For more than a fortnight. A month, in truth. This here is where the trail runs cold. No emissions. No heat signatures either. You know what that means out here, m'lord." The old ranger's smile was mirthless.

Ser Waymar Royce may have been young, but he was no dunce. This far away from the sun, on the edge to vastness of the great void, the cold could kill a man in a few minutes, even if he was insulated in a good skinsuit. No heat signatures meant nothing over there produced enough energy to register on Gared's scanners. And if no generators ran to heat the place...

"Tell me again what you saw, Will. All the details. Leave nothing out," he commanded and swung his seat around. Studying the glittering twilight of shifting shadows in that half-bored, half-distracted way he had, his eyes tried to focus on a spot in the shadows of two large rocks. Will had ridden with the knight long enough to understand that it was best not to interrupt him when he looked like that.

One piece of stone may have been a dull gray in the light of the full sun. The other was an iceberg easily as large as one of the decrepit brick tenements he knew from Reach's cities the small folk dwelt in. But here they lay equally dark and foreboding out there, a mere mile away. Between them, hidden now from plain sight, lay their prey.

Will had been a hunter before he joined the Night's Watch. Well, a poacher in truth. Mallister constables had caught him red-handed in the Mallisters' own woods, skinning one of the Mallisters' own bucks. For years he had become more and more apt at evading his pursuers. Yet he'd gone against his own rules that day, but the animal's fur had been too good and the constabulary too persistent for him to risk hauling a five hundred pound buck out of the woods. So engrossed in the task he had been that he hadn't noticed the motion triggers he had planted go off. The tip of a blade at his throat and the cold steel of a barrel of a gun to the back of his head had been the first and only warning. It had been a choice of putting on the black or losing a hand. No one could evade being seen as easily as Will, and it had not taken the black brothers long to discover his talent.

Will licked his lips. "The habitat's wedged in between those two large boulders in a stable position. Perfect hiding place. Barrel-shaped. Some fifty paces long, maybe half as great in diameter. I can't say for certain. The dark, m'lord." He shrugged.

Royce motioned him to continue while he kept staring into the darkness of space.

"On top there's a torus with some docking ports. All empty except one."

"The ship our raiding party used?"

"Yes, m'lord." Will let out an inaudible sigh.

"Are you sure?" Royce insisted.

Will hesitated for a moment. He wanted nothing so much as to turn their tiny craft around and make for the security of Castle Black. But he was a sworn brother, and probably to his own great surprise, the words he had spoken when he had taken the oath still reverberated in his heart. Duty won over his desires, and he pressed on.

"I got as close as I dared, then made a scan with my suit, m'lord. The readings match those of the ship we've been tracking all this time."

A week ago the raider ship had thrown them off its track. Royce had either been close to tears or to cutting his and Gared's heads off, but the older ranger's wizardry on the scanners had dug up a trail in form of the raider's decaying drive wake. In the end the raiding party's edge of three days had been no gain to them.

Royce swung back around. "And the Wildlings?"

Will shook his head. "Nothing. No heat, no light from the inside, no movement. If they were still alive there would be something. But there isn't."

"Did you see any bodies?"

"Well, no," Will admitted. How could he? He'd been a quarter mile away from the habitat, clinging to a man-sized lump of dirty ice, asking himself what in the name of old gods and the new he was doing there.

"Did you spot any damage?"

"No, not from my vantage point. Might be there is, m'lord."

"Could be there was a problem and they abandoned the place. Maybe they thought there was more men chasing them than just us three," Gared suggested.

Royce furrowed his thin brows. "And leave a good ship behind, and no sentries to watch over the station?! Not even a fishwife would believe such a tale."

Gared bit down and angry reply. He knew the youth was right. The Wildlings were scavengers and raiders, warring as much amongst each other as they plagued the outer system. For many a habitat like those the mining guild owned a dime a dozen had the value of a king's palace, often providing shelter for a whole clan. And the ship was of equal, maybe even greater value.

"They're dead," Will said. "We should leave it at that." Despite himself, he shivered.

"You have a chill?" Royce asked.

"Some," Will muttered, feeling for his skinsuit's temperature control. But the cold did not come from the outside.

The young knight turned back to his grizzled man-at-arms. "Suppose they _are_ dead. What do you think might have killed these men, Gared?"

"It's the air scrubbers," Gared said with iron certainty. "The Wildlings have a hand for patching up things, but they cannot do miracles. And most of what they got is older than anyone can remember. Only part of the equipment that has to run all the time. People tend to forget that. Everyone talks about radiation, about running out of food and water, but out here the real enemy is suffocation. It steals up on you quieter than Will, and at first you cough and sneeze and get tired and only want to go to sleep. It saps the life out of you, easier and calmer than a knife in the night. You want to lie down and go to sleep. First you go weak and drowsy, and everything starts to fade, and then it's like sinking into a sea of warm milk. Peaceful, like. Those are the lucky ones." He looked Royce in the eye. "It's far worse if it gets inside you and you realize what's happening. You panic, you scream, you claw at your own throat, all the while wasting what precious little air you might have left. I've seen men go mad with fear, shedding their skinsuits, walking through airlocks because their minds told them there surely would be more air to breathe on the other side. It's not pretty what empty space does to a man's body."

"Such eloquence, Gared," Ser Waymar observed. "I never suspected you had it in you."

"I've had the madness in me too, lordling." Gared pulled back tight hood of his skinsuit, giving Ser Waymar a good long look at the black and gray patches of implants where his ears had been. "Two ears, and three toes and the better part of my left hand lost to the cold. I got off light. We found my brother's patrol boat halfway between the Shadow Tower and Castle Black, all three men dead, with smiles on their faces."

Ser Waymar shrugged. "You ought be more careful, Gared."

Gared glared at the lordling, the scars around the implants flushed red with anger where Maester Aemon had cut the dead flesh away. But he kept his peace and instead pulled up his hood and hunched over his cot, silent and sullen.

"If Gared said it was they suffocated . . ." Will began.

"Where were you born, Will?"

"A small village on Reach, m'lord." What did his origins have to do with anything at the moment. What was the man driving at?

"A world with sweet air, deep blue skies and lush hills and fields. And the Wildlings? Where do they grow up."

"In space," Will said, frowning. He saw it clear enough, now that the lordling had pointed it out. "They would have known, would have taken precautions."

Royce nodded. "Bright lad. Wildlings are pretty much born in their skinsuits, with a wrench in one hand and a blade in the other. Air scrubbers out here are worth their weight in gold. No Wildling holdfast would leave its unattended, lest they risk their own ruin. And if what you say is true, the station had place for plenty of men. Men, let me remind you, adjusted to surviving out here, with the means and skills to repair damages." The knight's smile was cocksure. "Will, lead us there. I would see these dead men for myself."

And then there was nothing to be done for it. The order had been given, and honor bound them to obey.

They shouldered rifles and checked their blades, put on their helmets in silence and waited until Royce had depressurized the cabin. Then they were out.

Will went in front, his body more accustomed to the lack of gravity due to his earlier scouting mission. He pushed himself away from the craft and deftly somersaulted into position. It was a bit like swimming. Only here the sea had no bottom or surface, and the beach soon would be a tiny gray spot in an _ocean_ of gray and white and black. Ser Waymar Royce came next, right on Will's heels, fumbling and cartwheeling for the first seconds in the bottomless void before he remembered his training. His gloved fingers pointed towards their destination, and Will swung around. A controlled burst of air erupted from his backpack, and he was on his way.

Dust and glittering ice parted as he fell towards the shadowed station. Ice flowers cracked and burst into thousands of tiny pieces. He couldn't shake the feeling that if he went any faster they would cut him up from head to toe.

Gared brought up the rear. The old man-at-arms muttered to himself as he followed them.

Twilight between the gently but remorselessly moving stellar debris deepened. With no air to break the light the barrier between bright and dark was barely existent. On the other side of the Silent Expanse the stars began to come out. A ray of sunlight broke through an opening behind them. Ice glittered and sparkled, turning the brief moment into one of all the colors of the rainbow. Will was grateful for the it.

"We can make a better pace than this, surely," Will heard Royce's voice in his speakers, dulled and tinny, the sentence broken in two by the ragged breath that came with being stuck in a suit.

"Not in these surroundings," Will said hoarsely. Fear had made him insolent. "Perhaps my lord would care to risk an encounter with a stray shard?"

Ser Waymar Royce did not deign to reply.

Somewhere off in the far distance two rocks inaudibly collided. The only hint of the giants' meeting was an expanding sphere of dust and icycles that, in time, would fall back in line due to gravity's relentless power.

Will turned around, inertia still pushing him towards the hidden habitat, and fired his thrusters again.

Royce was almost on him before the lordling followed his lead and also slowed down. "What are you doing?" Ser Waymar asked.

"Well enter the shadows soon," Will replied. "Better to move more carefully now. We don't know for sure what's drifting in the dark."

Royce kept his peace for the moment, drifting alongside the young ranger until they crossed the light threshold.

It was hard to get distances right in the void without instruments, but it did not take the three brothers long to enter the deep shadow of the Wildling dwelling. The wide tube loomed over them, dark and foreboding.

Even in the little light they still had Will could see that the torus did not move. He tapped his commander on the arm and pointed up. Best to remain quiet now, he thought.

Royce's eyes followed the gesture with a hint of annoyance flashing in them, but after a second he nodded. Docked to the ring hung the raiders' ship. Against the deep twilight it was all but a vaguely triangular shape, but the lordling saw enough to tell it, too, did not move. He motioned Will to move ahead.

Cautiously, the former poacher lit his suit's torches. Cold mechanical rays swept over the station's outer hull. Once upon a time it might have been white as the first winter snows, but none of them had been alive back then. Not even old Gared. Now its once smooth skin consisted of more patches than a gleeman's cloak, bolted and welded on the old frame until the old surface only remained in small parts between all the raw unpainted metal and ceramic tiles.

Will fired his thrusters once more, briefly, and drifted upwards, searching for an airlock they could enter through. Upon closer inspection the barrel-shaped main part of the Wildling dwelling wasn't smooth at all. Here and there whole compartments protruded outwards, adding precious living space. Generations must have added to the construction by the clearly visible different ages of them. But they concerned Will much more for they were obstacles in his path, and sharp and twisted edges could prove to be just as fatal as fire from a gun or a strike by a honed blade.

The cone of light wandered along the hull, up and up – and down. There it was!

Will stopped. Before long the torches of his brothers illuminated him. He pointed straight ahead.

An airlock, its edges black with soot and its front pockmarked from decades – maybe centuries – of exposure to open space. Getting in was easy. A small hatch covered by stardust contained a lever to manually open the lock. Age and lack of use had frozen it in place. Will pushed down on it with all his strength. Ever so slowly the piece of iron moved, until it finally locked in place.

Silently, the airlock swung open.

Again, Will took point. The ranger waited until the other black brothers had closed the outer hatch behind him. There was no way to gauge whether there still was air inside the station from where they stood. Had he opened the inner hatch and found an atmosphere it would have blown them all out into space with a power none of the men of the Night's Watch would have survived.

The three men shared a look, then Royce motioned Will to proceed.

Without any resistance the inner hatch slid open. There was no air inside. And no gravity.

Will vaulted himself inside. His feet briefly touched the ground, and with a push on a belt button the soles of his boots magnetized. It made for awkward walking. Still, he felt better with the knowledge that his hand were free to grab a weapon anytime. His torch focused, much like a man's eye, and shone ahead. They were in a narrow corridor leading straight to the habitat's center. Ice crystals and refuse and belongings hung suspended in the air. Further down the hallway what looked like a shoe turned around its own axis in infinitesimally slow rotations. Frost glittered on the walls as his torch trailed over them.

Ser Waymar Royce peered into the twilight. No Wildlings lay in ambush, no focused beams of light burned through their skinsuits. Still, his breath went faster than before.

Gared's stance echoed that of his commander, but the older man's face was blank. "There's something very wrong here," he muttered.

The young knight gave him a disdainful smile. "Is there?"

"Can't you feel it?" Gared asked. "Listen to the darkness."

Will could feel it. Four years in the Night's Watch, and he had never been so afraid. What was it?

"Are you afraid of the dark, like a little boy, Gared?"

Gared's face was a shadow against the light of his own torch, but Will could still see the hard glitter in his eyes as he stared at the knight. For a moment he was afraid the older man would go for his sword. It was a short, ugly thing, its grip discolored by sweat, its edge nicked from hard use, but Will would not have given an iron bob for the lordling's life if Gared pulled it from its scabbard. Finally Gared looked down.

Royce took it for acquiescence and turned away. "Guard the exit. Might be we'll have to leave here in a hurry." He didn't sound as if he really believed it. "Lead on," he said to Will, and drew his longsword from its sheath. Jewels glittered in its hilt, and the torchlight ran down the shining steel's red monofilament edge. It was a splendid weapon, castle-forged, and new-made from the look of it. Will doubted it had ever been swung in anger.

"Not enough space in here," Will warned. "Better use a smaller blade."

"If I need instructions, I will ask for it," the young lord said.

Will started deeper into the quiet Wildling home, pushing drifting garbage and personal belonging aside on his way. His feet made clanking noises, even though his own ears could hear them. The airless void carried no sound. Next to him Ser Waymar Royce almost glided over the bare metal ground, his movements far more natural than Will's. The former poacher had heard of armorers who could build such skinsuits; only the part of your foot that truly touched the ground magnetized. Unlike the clumsy walk Will was restricted to the young lordling's stride was nigh normal.

They passed open hatches on the way to the center; rooms were the clan slept and gathered and lived. All were empty of living things, but not empty of signs of life. Cards hung suspended in the air. Spoons and knives and forks hovered over to plates of food, the meals stuck to them like glue despite hanging with the wrong side downwards in mid air. The toys of youngsters remained, just as well as kitchenware and tools and clothes. It was as if something had spirited the Wildlings away in the middle of their daily lifes.

Yet, if four years on the Wall had taught Will one thing it was caution. He stopped at every hatch and corner, ready to draw his dull gray blade its scabbard. It had none of the lordling's swords' finesse, but hours and hours with oil and a whetstone had made it sharp to the touch. He didn't even think of the blaster he had shouldered; in these confines, with all the debris flying around, a quick blade would serve him better.

A long step brought him past another opening. Will moved on, stopped, then bent back again.

"What is it?!" Royce called angrily.

"Greenhouse, m'lord."

"What do I care for Wildling turnips?" the lordling snapped. "On with you, Will."

Will pried his eyes off the frost-covered plants. He didn't know what worried him more: that there were enough to feed at least fifty people – or that nobody had bothered to take the valuable green with them.

Wherever they went the pictures remained the same. Quarters devoid of people, but filled with their belongings. The chill he had felt back on their tiny ship had returned with a vengeance and now crept into his bones. By sheer force of will he urged himself on. Will wanted nothing so much there and then as turn around, run out of the airlock and head back behind the safety of the wall with its vast minefield and automated battle stations. But duty weighed heavy on him. Numb fingers opened another hatch, and the two brothers of the Night's Watch finally entered the center of the habitat.

It was a wide room, a good fifteen paces across. Four other hatches led away from it. All of them stood open. No light broke through the openings. The station was as dead there as it had been of the brothers' side.

Will groaned. The pervasive feeling of wrongness that had clung to him the whole time suddenly weighed physically on him. It was as if entering the room had crossed a threshold. His lips were dry as parchment.

"Get back," his voice was a rasp. "This place is wrong. Can't you feel it?"

"You're beginning to sound like Gared. Have you lost your wits already?" Royce did not move. He looked at the empty space and laughed. "If the Wildings truly are dead they seem to have gone to great length to hide themselves in death. Much more likely that they moved camp."

Will's voice abandoned him. He groped for words that did not come. It was not possible. Now far more than ever his eyes swept back and forth over the abandoned station. Nothing here made sense to him. Easy for the lordling to say the Wildlings had left, but Will knew with the certainty coming close to faith that _none_ of those voidwards of the Wall would have simply left a place like this. As if to prove him right a last time his eyes stopped on the rifle. Spinning in mid air. A fine blaster, it's energy cell fully loaded, with a scope and an underslung launcher for small missiles. A valuable weapon, even corewards of the Wall . . .

"Get a grip, Will," Ser Waymar commanded. He looked him over with open disapproval. "I am not going back to Castle Black a failure on my first ranging. We will find these men." He glanced around, then raised his eyes. The room extended upwards into the darkness. "Get up there. Be quick about it. Look for an access port or further hatches."

Will turned away, wordless. There was no use to argue. He disengaged the magnetic locks on his boots and pushed himself off the ground. Soon he had drifted into the darkness above. His torch flickered, then died. Fear filled his gut like a meal he could not digest. He whispered a prayer to the nameless gods of the void, and slipped his blade free of its sheath. The crude night vision in his helmet sprung to life, turning his surroundings into shades of sickly green and gray. Pipes and cables crossed the ceiling in a huge tangle. Thin metal sheet plates had come loose and quietly drifted among them.

Down below, the lordling called out suddenly, "Who goes there?" Will heard uncertainty in the challenge. He stopped moving; he listened; he watched.

No answer came.

The Others made no sound.

"Will, where are you?" Ser Waymar called up. "Can you see anything?" He was turning in a slow circle, suddenly wary, his sword in hand. He must have felt them, as Will felt them. There was nothing to see. "Answer me! Why is it so cold?"

It was cold. Shivering, Will drew back further into the tangled ceiling. He could feel the cold crawl into his skinsuit.

A shadow emerged from the dark of the dead station. It stood in front of Royce. Tall, it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh pale as milk and limbs too long for a man. Its armor seemed to take the color of its surroundings as it moved; here it was white as new-fallen snow, there black as shadow, everywhere dappled with the deep gray and reddish rust of the walls. The patterns ran like moonlight on water with every step it took, making it look as if it was only halfway part of reality.

Will heard the breath go out of Ser Waymar Royce in a long hiss. "Come no farther," the lordling warned. His voice cracked like a boy's. He took a step back to steady his footing, and took his sword in both hands. It was very cold.

The Other slid forward on silent feet as if the lack of gravity was of no concern to it. In its hand was a longsword like none that Will had ever seen. No human craft had gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed almost to vanish when seen edge-on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the thing, a ghost-light that played around its edges, and somehow Will knew it was sharper than any razor.

Ser Waymar met him bravely. "Dance with me then." He lifted his sword high over his head, defiant. In that moment, Will thought, he was a boy no longer, but a man of the Night's Watch.

The Other halted. Even this far away Will saw its eyes in its insect-shaped helmet; blue, deeper and bluer than any human eyes, a blue that burned like ice. They fixed on the lordling's longsword, watched the torchlight running cold along the metal. For a heartbeat he dared to hope.

They emerged silently from the other hatches, twins to the first. Three of them ... four ... five ... Ser Waymar may have felt the cold that came with them, but he never saw them, never heard them. Will had to call out. It was his duty. And his death, if he did. He shivered, and clutched the cables, and kept the silence.

The pale sword came shivering down in a wide arc.

Ser Waymar met it with hard steel. When the blades met blue sparks flew and unseen shockwaves seemed to travel outwards. Will knew it was impossible but he _felt_ each clash of the blades. Royce checked a second blow, and a third, then fell back a step.

Another flurry of blows, and he fell back again.

Behind him, to right, to left, all around him, the watchers stood patient, faceless, silent, the shifting patterns of their delicate armor making them all but invisible in the shadow. Yet they made no move to interfere.

Again and again the swords met, until Will wanted to scream from the top of his lungs against the strange anguished keening of their clash. Ser Waymar was panting from the effort now, his breath steaming over his helmet's visor. His blade was white with frost; the Other's danced with pale blue light.

Then Royce's parry came a beat too late. The pale sword bit through the armor beneath his arm. The young lord cried out in pain. Blood steamed out of the wound, but not much. It froze the cold, and the droplets formed red crystals as they floated away from him. Ser Waymar's fingers brushed his side. He quickly pulled them back with a yelp. The wound seemed to burn.

Will's speakers crackled. The Other said something in a language that the ranger did not know; his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking.

Ser Waymar Royce found his fury. "For Robert!" he shouted, and he came up snarling, lifting the frost-covered longsword with both hands and swinging it around in a flat sidearm slash with all his weight behind it. The Other's parry was almost lazy.

When the blades touched, the steel shattered.

A scream echoed through the soundless void, and the longsword exploded into a hundred brittle pieces, the shards scattering like a rain of needles. Royce went to his knees, shrieking, and covered his face. Blood welled between his fingers. Air steamed from a dozen holes in his suit.

The watchers moved forward together, as if some signal had been given. Swords rose and fell, all in a deathly silence. It was cold butchery. The pale blades sliced through armor that would have given blaster fire pause as if it were silk. Will closed his eyes. Far beneath him, he heard their voices and laughter sharp as icicles.

When he found the courage to look again, a long time had passed, and the room below was empty.

He stayed in the tangle of pipes and cables and debris, scarce daring to breathe. Finally, his muscles cramping and his fingers numb with cold, he drifted down again. He dared not use his radio to call Gared now that he had heard the Others' communicate that way.

Royce's body drifted facedown through the room, one arm outflung. The skinsuit had been slashed in a dozen places. Dead like that, you saw how young he was. A boy.

The remains of the sword drifted all around him, the end splintered and twisted like a tree struck by lightning. Will hesitated, looked around warily, and snatched them up. The broken sword would be his proof. Gared would know what to make of it, and if not him, then surely that old bear Mormont or Maester Aemon.

Would Gared still be guarding the exit? He had to hurry. Will turned around.

Ser Waymar Royce stood over him. His armor was a tatter, his visor shattered, his face a ruin. A shard from his sword transfixed the blind white pupil of his left eye. The right eye was open. The pupil burned blue. It saw.

On the edge of his vision Will saw more pairs of shining blue eyes in the corridors leading away. Not Others, though.

The broken sword slipped from nerveless fingers. Will closed his eyes to pray. Long, elegant hands brushed his helmet, then tightened around his throat. They were gloved in the best skinsuit money could buy and sticky with blood, yet the touch was icy cold.


End file.
